On my Needles & Between my Pages October 19th

On My Needles
The christmas knitting is starting to pick up momentum, so I had a hard time narrowing this down to one WIP this week. I’d love to show you Little J’s super secret Christmas knitting, but her mum is back from their trip to New Zealand, (where I firmly believe she bought all the available wool), and she may see the gift here, so I have to skip that one. I will say it’s so darn cute that my head threatens to explode every time I work on it.

I have finished all the pieces of the Gargoyle I showed you last week, but haven’t sewn it together yet.

I have another WIP that is so secret this is the first time I’ve ever brought it up on my blog though it’s been in the works for a few months now. I am dying to share it, but really can’t. Not even a hint.

So I finally decided to share this. The latest progress on the Noro Log cabin Blanket for my brother and sister in-law. All twenty squares are blocked and ready to be organized. The blocking worked perfectly and all of the squares are now approximately the same size which is good ’cause there were a few that really were not the right size, pre-blocking. Clearly some of the squares were knit when I was a little more tense or distracted than other squares, so a few were just wee tiny little things that needed a little coaxing to become the appropriate size. We live in a one bedroom apartment so blocking that many squares was a little bit of a challenge. It took about 6 days (as I had to do them in batches), and we had to move the coffee table. It is worth every bit of hassle and the finished blanket is going to look much better because of it.

Between my pages

Having finished The Magicians, I moved onto a new novel, Winterwood by Patrick Mccabe. Picked this up just over a week ago in an absolutely charming used book store that my husband and I stumbled across while waiting to meet friends for dinner. This book made it into the take home pile because it was described as “a modern-day gothic ghost story”. I’m halfway through the book and I can tell you that the description actually translates to “drunken hallucinations of a man spiralling into despair as he wrestles with the guilt of a failed marriage and having befriended a man who turns out to be a murderous paedophile.” Oh, and that women are the root of much unhappiness. Not really what I expected. The story is written very much like a drunk man’s ramblings, with plot jumps and time shifts and not a lot of actual plot progressions because the story is too busy circling back in on itself. Currently I am finishing this book out of some sort of absolute stubbornness and diminishing hope that the author will somehow tie all of this together and that there will be some sort of redemption to the work as a whole. I’m not certain that’s going to happen. Not one for recommending. Find something else to read. You’ll be better off.